


(second) chance

by alliariondak (Sprytemark)



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Gen, Metagaming, Video Game Mechanics, and major character death but he gets better (over and over), it's mostly Sora, memories are hard, not graphic but there are depictions of violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-19
Updated: 2019-11-19
Packaged: 2021-02-13 09:44:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21492283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sprytemark/pseuds/alliariondak
Summary: alt title: critical mode is hard, and this is a videogame where you never die for real.Sora is floating in an endless sea of nothing and his heart — his own heart — is right there in front of him.Sora reaches up and takes it.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 80





	(second) chance

Sora leans his head back on the wall behind the couch, his hands tangled in the straps of his pants, pretending to be asleep.

Hiro’s garage is quiet enough now to make sleeping believable — Donald wandered off with Honey Lemon somewhere babbling about alchemical construction, the rest of them are in the cafe area eating day old donuts that Aunt Cass didn’t sell (probably their fault anyway, they should leave her some munny. It all turns into yen here. What’s the exchange rate…?). Hiro’s not with them, he’s on the opposite side of the garage typing something into his computer and fiddling with the old Baymax’s charging port (turns out he was real low on battery). New Baymax stands next to him, blinking quietly — every once in a while Hiro starts reading lines of code to him before cutting himself off with a tiny “ah!” and typing again. 

So Sora can pretend to be asleep. Which is great, because the second it calmed down in here, Sora’s heart started… he wouldn’t say yelling is the right word. More like, panicking, and being relieved at the same time, but all balled up into one slowly-spreading sensation that left him a little too short of breath to join a conversation. 

He’s thinking, too much. Which is something Donald would scoff at good-naturedly, and he’d object to the insult, but really, he’s not thinking so much as he is feeling, and he does that all the time but he’s doing it too much. And the problem there is he couldn’t… probably… tell you about  _ what.  _ He’s feeling. Just that there’s a lot of it, and none of it is good. 

Hence the sitting and pretending to nap so no one talks to him, because he’s good at being fine, but not at confrontation. 

Something is wrong, is what he feels. What he knows. Something is wrong, they won, they have won? They’re winning? He can’t help but feel like they lost. But they didn’t, because they’re here and they won, but he’s not  _ here _ — this is confusing. Sora has been confused like this before; had sections of time in his memory blink out and skip like broken records. But he’d chalked that up to deja vu and a whole year of messed-up memories. Half of him wants to ignore it again, maybe get on the ship and start flying immediately but Hiro’s aunt insisted they stay for another night and…

Sora groans, quietly, and presses one hand to his face, slowly enough to keep up the half-asleep look. 

Don’t think he doesn’t notice Hiro slow and stop typing, and glance behind him before turning his chair fully and giving Sora a look somewhere between worrying and puzzling out a solution. 

“Hey, Baymax,” Hiro says, just loud enough for Sora to hear. “Think you can go check on Sora?”

“Certainly,” says Baymax, and there’s a telltale  _ shuffleshuffleshuffle _ which means he’s walking over here, and Sora tries really really hard not to sigh or grimace or anything. 

“Sora.”

“Oh. Hey, Baymax,” he says, opening one eye. 

“You seem [upset]. Would you care for a [hug]?”

A smile tugs at the edge of Sora’s mouth, despite everything, at the sweet robotic way he offered, but he puts his arms behind his head. 

“It’s okay, I’m not upset, I’m just thinking.”

“Is something else the matter?”

“Huh? Not really. I mean, Donald’s got a mean curaga.”

Sora swears Batmax’s eyes narrow. They don’t, but it feels like they do. 

“I will scan you now.”

Sora drops his hands, confused. “What are you scanning f-”

“Scan complete.”

“Woa- already?”

Baymax straightens, processing. Sora tilts his head at the little bips coming from the robot’s core, hovering somewhere between wary and curious. Baymax finally looks at him and raises one hand, pointedly. 

“You do not have any physical injuries. However, you are suffering from [increased heart rate], and [mild tremors], commonly due to [stress] or [anxiety]. It can also be due to [exercise] and [low air temperature].”

Sora gapes at him and snaps his mouth shut, eyes darting around the garage. If Hiro heard that, he wasn’t going to acknowledge it, and no one had come in the door in the past minute. Maybe... 

“I’m really fine, Baymax. Honest, not even that cold,” he says, instead, a little weirded out. 

Baymax shuffles over to place himself next to Sora, rather than in front of him. It looks like he can’t sit down very well on the couch, though, so he just ends up half-leaning on it. 

One big marshmallow paw comes down gently on his knee. “There, there,” Baymax says, with the closest thing he has to a smile in his voice. 

Sora pushes at his arm, softly. “I’m serious, it’s—“ He blinks. “Oh, you’re really warm. How are you doing that?”

“I can use my [internal heat source] to assist with low temperatures.”

“Whoa.” Sora’s push has turned into more of a gentle hug around Baymax’s arm, leaning into it like a pillow. 

Baymax gives him a good ten seconds of warm pillow distraction before speaking up again. “Would you like to [talk about it]?”

“Aha, no thanks, Baymax. There’s not much to talk about.”

“I am a good listener.” 

“Aw, I bet--“ ow, ow ow  _ ow _ what the— that  _ hurts— _

Sora very, very slowly uncurls his hand again. The sensation-memory-feeling  _ thing  _ came back with a vengeance, what did Baymax  _ say _ that… 

Baymax is patting his leg again, which takes his mind ever so gently off that subject again. Luckily it’s with his other arm, so it’s not making his head bounce up and down. This would be really relaxing if it wasn’t for the very, very wrong  _ thing.  _ He might actually be able to sleep. 

Man, he hasn’t slept in forever. Time is— time is. It’s, it’s long. He—

_ —clings fiercely to the metal handholds on their Baymax’s back, the wind threatening to rip him straight out of the tangle with every second they fall.  _

_ He can’t do much, anything really, it’s too loud and too fast and Sora grits his teeth as Baymax flips upside-down to aim at the other Baymax’s core.  _

_ An explosion of noise and heat, and the nanorobotic claw battering them through the air vanishes, but for too short a time, it slashes through metal with an awful screeching noise and the jolt nearly dislocates Sora’s arm.  _

_ Baymax is supposed to flip upright and boost away from the incoming wreck just in time, somehow Sora knows this, but that’s not what happens.  _

_ Instead, they crash to the ground in a sideways spiral, and Sora’s hands are ripped free from the small bars and he registers the grass on his face and the sting of asphalt on his elbows before the shock like a sledgehammer through his chest. _

_ Something through his... _

_ This isn’t supposed to... _

_ He forgets to breathe, honestly, it’s hard when something else demands all of his focus. Sora’s vision blurs and greys at the edges and he can’t really tell if it’s blood in his mouth or not because it all feels like it’s turning to ash in creeping waves, anyways, a static fuzz pushing everything else out, and he realizes with a dull jolt that he’s not holding his keyblade. Cure is harder without it. If, if he- if maybe - something’s still- _

_ Not like this— _

No, no no no no that didn’t happen. That didn’t happen. It didn’t,

Sora realizes he’s maybe holding Baymax’s arm a bit too tightly if he can feel the metal. He starts to let go, but another hand sits itself gently on top of his head, and he suddenly remembers he’s sitting in Hiro’s garage and forces himself to breathe  _ out,  _ if in stuttering bursts. Sora actually does let go after that, grabbing at his gloves instead. 

Baymax blinks at him. “Would you like to [talk about it]?” He repeats. 

He can’t. They never happened. None of those ever happened. Not this time. Sora knows this. Never ever happened and he should take solace in this, that he’s doing it right, but they  _ could have _ , and his heart won’t give him a direct answer. None of them happened and he won’t remember knowing they did if he does it right, he shouldn’t remember so in a sudden snap of will he  _ doesn’t _ . His heart protests. He shakes his head.

“That is alright. I am here if you change your mind.”

Sora snorts, a little. He hesitates, for a really, really long moment. He’s not changing his mind about talking about… whatever it is that was bugging him, but he still feels like gunk on the inside. What was so wrong a minute ago? 

“Hey, are you… is that offer for a hug still open?”

Baymax doesn’t say yes, but he does just straight-up hug him, and what with him being warm and soft and plushie and all, Sora might just melt straight into it. 

“Thanks, Baymax. I think today has been. Really long, what with Riku and all,” he whispers, strained. 

“Negative experiences will often feel much longer than normal. Your perception of time slows down, but it is just your perception.”

Sora laughs once, quietly, a little mortified to hear how thick his voice sounds. “‘S that true?”

“You should listen to him,” Hiro’s quiet voice drifts over from the computer desk. “He knows what he’s talking about. Trust me.” 

“Yeah. Alright. ...Thanks.”

“No prob.”

* * *

Sora returns to Toybox to scout for the materials he needs and finds himself staring at a brightly colored vending machine selling drinks. 

It’s way,  _ way _ taller than he is right now, so no way are they getting a drink from it, but still. Sora looks at it for a weird amount of time, trying to place what’s wrong. He comes to the conclusion that he doesn’t  _ like _ that vending machine, which is frankly a ridiculous thing to say, so maybe it’s just that there’s something different about it. 

Sora wonders if it was broken or something the last time they were here. Feeling pins and needles prickling at your skin like phantom shards of glass is a weird sensation when you’re supposedly made of plastic. 

* * *

It’s a while before he remembers again. 

Sora wanted to go back to the Caribbean, partly because he wanted to find a specific ingredient for Little Chef and partly because he really really wants to be a pirate on his own ship in the middle of the sea for maybe one or two more days before… everything. Kind of a last-ditch playdate with way too much danger for kids, but those aren’t the words he’d use to describe it. He wanted to bring Riku,  _ really  _ badly, but the King dragged him off somewhere to do important Master things, again before Everything. 

So instead Sora’s sailing through the most dangerous waters he can searching for an unnameable feeling to carry him. Which Donald, despite being a  _ duck,  _ who should  _ like _ water, is pretty opposed to. It may have something to do with him lifting the Leviathan out of the ocean and slamming it back down. 

Sora grins fiercely as he rams another ship with the bow of the Leviathan, a shudder of white filling in the cracks it makes in the wood. The ethereal ship disintegrates in a whirl of smoke, but not before three anchor raiders latch on to his sails and board. Feeling rather confident in himself, he flips over the wheel and airsteps directly into the closest one, releasing a devastating chain of attacks and crowing in triumph when it loses its grip and slams into the deck. 

Sora follows it down and stabs his keyblade through it, kicking the dark vapor it leaves behind and suddenly his heart screams **_move!_** and he ducks and whirls around before he even knows what’s happening and a huge metal scimitar turns the deck where he was to splinters. 

The heartless charges him and his body moves automatically, in a dance, one he doesn’t know the moves to but a vicious tug tells him  _ left, right, step, step, strike _ as he does. Left, right, jump, duck, thunder, right, dodge, strike and it disappears, and Sora blinks back the vision to his eyes, his breath run ragged. 

It’s quiet. They must have taken care of the last one. It’s quiet except for the  _ deafening  _ heartbeat in Sora’s ears, and he grips the necklace at his chest like it’s the hand squeezing the air from his lungs as if he can rip it off. 

He didn’t dodge. Before. Something — before. This is the first time he’s been here. This is a time that he’s been here. Happening, happened, a long string between then and now and Hiro and here and he was doing  _ so well  _ and Sora digs his dirty nails into the wood he finds himself collapsed onto. 

His heart hurts. It’s remembering, though he  _ can’t,  _ it doesn’t usually ache like this what makes this time (this time— is the only—) special, Sora forces himself to not listen to it. He’s -- done this before, gone into a state where he just moves and doesn’t know why. But this—

A gentle breeze and a shower of bells caress at his cheek, which doesn’t help. He’s not hurt. He just  _ hurts  _ and he won’t remember. 

Sora won’t remember doing a flashy flip with Wheel of Fate and suddenly jerking to his knees with metal through his shoulder and turning too late to avoid being thrown across the deck like shatterglass, he won’t remember dying and staring up at Riku’s face and he won’t remember how many times it took to face the armor in the desert and dusk after dusk of lucky shots and he  _ won’t  _ remember failing again and again and cheating his way out of it—

His heart will. As it gets emptier and emptier of extra (friends, light)  _ distraction _ it gets harder to find the difference between his memories and its. Maybe they were never supposed to be separate. 

Sora forgets again, as he comes back to the present, with only a vague sense of crushing relief. Someone’s calling at him. 

“Sora!  _ Sora! _ ”

“I’m okay,” he says on reflex. 

“Gawrsh, are ya sure? You worried us for a minute there.”

“Yeah.” Sora blinks, and pushes himself off the ground. He sways, but stays upright, any remaining trepidation slowly leaking from his posture. 

“Maybe you should lie down,” Donald says. 

“Nah, I’ve done enough lying down. C’mon, there’s still a few islands we haven’t been to! Treasure to find!”

Donald sighs, and gives Goofy a shrug when Sora practically dances back to the stern. “That’s Sora for you,” he mutters. 

* * *

He remembers in the Keyblade Graveyard. 

He remembers because the demon tide takes him in a chaotic river rapids of darkness and it doesn’t just  _ end  _ there. Of course, it never did. 

Sora is floating in an endless sea of nothing and his heart — his own heart — is right there in front of him. 

Sora reaches up and takes it. 

* * *

The heartless blot out the sun, and Sora stares. 

He knows this place.  _ Knows  _ it, knows it, and it leaves him speechless because that’s the  _ thing that kills us _ . 

Riku’s hand lands on his shoulder, rough enough to jolt him out of his stupor but gentle enough to be reassuring. He only hears a little bit of what he says, his eyes tracking a spot just south of eye contact.

He can’t fix this one. 

_ This is inevitable  _ takes them.  _ All is right with the world _ roars and thunders across the ground and  _ it’s supposed to be this way _ rips his friends away and he can’t stop it  _ (he shouldn’t try) _ and he  _ (on a path laid out for you) _ collapses to the floor, a cry torn out of him in desperation  _ (destiny is out of your control) _ . 

Riku tells him not to give up. But give up on  _ what? _ It doesn’t matter, he knows what happens next. 

Riku doesn’t look back, he grits his teeth and grinds his heel into the dirt and  _ the thing that kills Riku _ tears him to shreds and rushes towards Sora with reckless self-assured glee. 

And in a second of horrified clarity, Sora lets himself die. 

* * *

Reflections of himself wandering, confused, in Traverse Town, on salt pillars. Maybe the young Xehanort knows more than he lets on. Maybe they’re on the same path.

Sora finds himself with water gently pooling around his fingers, caressing his hair with soft blue sky. The clouds are endless, smudged at the edges into what could go up for forever, probably. It’s comforting, in a way. To know that despite its claustrophobic nothingness this is not a world with an end, if you know where to go. This is familiar. 

He takes a deep breath, shakier than he thought it would be. 

Sora has done this before.

Sora will do this again. 

* * *

Sora gets a warning from Xigbar before he kills him, with a smirk like he knows how dumb that mistake was. He saw that coming, way before he was on the ground with the end of a ponytail distractingly close to his face.

Xigbar leans heavily on the hilt of his arrowgun, putting his head in his hand like he’s waiting for a snippet of gossip. The move sends blinding stars and static and furious lashes of heat through Sora’s vision, as if the weapon were a live wire connected to his ribs. He gasps, wetly, feels his keyblade disappear in a scatter of sparks. 

He’s waited on, until the noise fades. 

“Try blocking for once, eh?” Xigbar says, one of his canines catching on the outside of his lip. 

“Try… d-different… pat’rn, ‘n I’ll. Ttthink’bout it.”

“Well, go on, do your thing. Just so ya know, though, I’m not goin’ easy on you just because you’re gonna win.”

A cold shock drips through Sora’s chest, around the humming crystal. “Y- you,”  _ light _ , words are hard like this, his throat is too thick with heat to finish that thought. 

“Me,” Xigbar grins, his sharp features giving him a feral otherworldly edge. “Ready?”

Sora grits his teeth. Xigbar rips his arrowgun free.

* * *

_ Sora! _

_ So-ra! _

_ [call upon your bonds of friendship] _

* * *

Chirithy looks a little annoyed with him, in its cute little plushie way. Kind of like a teacher whose student keeps getting the right answers in the wrong ways, but can never catch him cheating.

Sora rubs the back of his neck, sheepishly. “Sorry.”

“No you aren’t.”

“Nah. I’m not sorry for trying to get Kairi back. I promised.”

“Alright,” Chirithy sighs. “Let’s try this once more.”

**Author's Note:**

> anchor raiders are so scary,,
> 
> hey ask me on twitter about how I think the power of waking is just fancy time travel, and also how I think videogames are cool --> @skipperkine


End file.
